Friday, July 4, 2014

An era of glorious innocence

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 2.)

For people of a certain age, last week was a week of
nostalgia.

June 21 marked 50 years since a Lockheed Electra carrying
the Beatles touched down at Wellington Airport. It was a significant moment,
and not just musically. Sociologically, it signalled the emergence of a youth
culture that was determined to assert itself in the face of stodgy,
adult-imposed conformity and conservatism.

Small wonder that ageing baby boomers spent last week
wallowing in fond reminiscence as radio stations dusted off their Beatles
records and newspapers reprinted photos of press conferences at which awestruck
reporters asked banal questions of the famous visitors, such as whether they
liked New Zealand mutton and butter – all of which were answered with patience
and good humour.

To anyone who grew up post-1970, it must be hard to imagine
the impact the group made here. New Zealand was naïve and insular. The rest of
the world seemed impossibly distant and exotic. Jet travel hadn’t yet made it
this far; Britain was still six weeks away by ship. The Beatles might have been
visitors from another planet.

Beatlemania, with its hordes of fans prepared to do almost
anything to get close to their heroes, mystified and unsettled local
authorities accustomed to young people behaving with compliant decorum. The
official response to the phenomenon ranged from overkill – such as at the
Wellington Town Hall, where the Beatles were unnerved by the sight of unsmiling
police constables occupying the front rows at their concerts – to woeful
ill-preparedness.

In Dunedin, only four policemen were on hand to ensure the
Beatles got into their hotel safely through the hundreds of eager fans. When it
was suggested that security was inadequate, the response was that the police
had coped with a visit by Vera Lynn a few weeks earlier, so what could possibly
go wrong?

Technologically too, New Zealand was found wanting. After
the first of their Wellington concerts, John Lennon threatened not to go on
again because the sound system was so hopeless. The sound technician was
terrified the speakers would blow up.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in cultural as well as
musical terms, the Beatles were a seismic event. Rock and roll wasn’t new, of
course; in the previous decade we’d had Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Ricky
Nelson, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. But in those days New Zealand took its
cultural cues from Britain rather than America.

The American-led rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, as
significant as it was, was limited in its impact in New Zealand compared with
the British beat boom led by the Beatles. I would argue that it was only
post-Beatles that a true mass youth culture began to emerge in buttoned-down,
monochrome New Zealand.

Though not a consciously subversive band, the Beatles
unleashed a heady sense of liberation and a willingness to defy adult
conventions. They did this through the sheer joy and exuberance of their music,
which gave expression to youthful passions that had been previously been kept
tightly controlled.

Musically speaking, they tilted the world’s axis.The American music industry was completely
blindsided by the so-called British invasion, of which the Beatles formed the
advance guard.

By that time the first raw, exhilarating wave of American rock
and roll – as embodied by Presley – had subsided, to be replaced by the
sanitised pop of Bobby Vinton, Neil Sedaka and Bobby Vee, much of it emanating
from New York City’s famous pop factory, the Brill Building. America was ready
for something new and the Beatles provided it: in April 1964 they had 14
singles simultaneously in the Billboard Hot 100.

It took years for America to recover from the shock and
reclaim its mantle as the wellhead of pop music. And of course the great irony
is that the music that inspired the Beatles and the other British bands that
followed in their wake – the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Manfred Mann, the
Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Who – was all American. What the British bands did was
repackage and re-energise American rock and roll and send it back to its home country, where
it was in danger of being forgotten.

After the Beatles, nothing was the same again. At its
heavier end, pop music soon morphed into something the pompous music critics
called “rock”, which was supposedly to be taken more seriously. “Rock” music
was freighted with sociological and political meaning.

The Stones, who deliberately cultivated a scowling, anti-establishment
image, were a “rock” band, whereas the Beatles – despite their astonishing
musicality – found themselves being dismissed as simply a very clever pop band.

Bob Dylan came along too – the first pop (sorry, rock) star
whose records were bought for their lyrics rather than the tunes. Pop music
split into ideological camps, and so it has remained ever since.

But all that was yet to happen when the Beatles touched down
in Wellington in 1964. Looking back, what’s most striking about that era is its
glorious innocence.

1 comment:

It certainly is a gross exaggeration to say it was some sort of great cultural event or what ever over the top term you used. For most of the country in 1964 it went almost unnoticed-in fact as a 23 year old I doubted that I even read about it. I liked the article someone wrote about going to see pianist Artre Rubenstein who was in the country at the same time and wondered what all the fuss was about. I guess in some ways it was the beginning of what we now see as pop music - groups promoted and sold whatever their musical talent-or lack of it.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.